Welcome to the Writing Center's help site for new Rhetoric Instructors. This site will tackle a couple of the most common questions we hear from those new to teaching 10:001, 10:002 and 10:003:

• What I am supposed to be teaching?
• And how am I supposed to teach THAT?

The "What" Question

Teaching rhetoric is not like teaching courses in other disciplines, where the idea is for the students to engage with and understand a particular body of knowledge. The goal of 10:001, 10:002 and 10:003 is for the students to learn basic academic skills.  Take, for example the description in the Student Academic Handbook:

“Rhetoric courses help students develop skills in speaking, writing, listening and critical reading, and build competence in research, analysis, and argumentation…these skills are basic to the rest of a student’s study in the College of Liberal Arts and Science…”

To this end the Rhetoric department describes 10:001, 10:002 and 10:003 as “introductions to college-level reading, writing and speaking.”

The objective, in other words, is for students to develop a set of TRANSFERABLE skills – skills that will be useful to them in other classes, as they go on through college and in other spheres of life, as they move into the wider world of work and civic life.

Because of this emphasis on skills, instructors have some leeway to develop their own content.  The curriculum is structured around the analysis of controversies – students are expected to begin by learning to analyze an argument, move on to mapping out the various positions in a controversy and eventually reach the point of being able to advocate a position of their own on an issue.  Instructors, however, can decide which controversies they wish to use as models for their students and, by the end of the semester, students choose their own topics.  This is one of the real strengths the general education rhetoric courses at Iowa: instructors can individualize their particular sections by selecting material and shaping their syllabi to reflect their own interests and expertise – a valuable teaching experience.  (To get a sense of the wide range of approaches possible see the Morphing Textbook for examples of assignments, exercises, lesson plans and even entire course packages created by previous instructors)  Ultimately, however, each instructor is guided by the goals set out by the Rhetoric department and evaluates each exercise, lesson plan and assignment in terms of how effectively it works to help the students master the key academic skills of reading, writing, speaking and researching arguments.  This section of the Writing Center website offers some suggestions for how to go about teaching reading and writing skills to rhetoric students.  (See the speaking center for suggestions on how to teach speaking and presentation skills)